A novel very high performance digital optical tape recorder is described. Linear tape motion at 4.2 meters per second and simultaneous writing of about 80 parallel bit tracks with a data density of three bits per micron per track enables a data rate of 1,000 Megabits per second, sufficient for a data rate of 100 megabytes per second with error correction. One micron track to track spacing gives a data capacity of one Terabyte (1,000 GB) in a single '3480' style tape cartridge shell. A single beam from a frequency doubled, laser diode pumped, solid state (2X- LDP-SS) laser is split into a multiplicity of like beams, each of which is then independently modulated at 12.5 MHz for recording.